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Comment by YuriNiyazov | Hacker News Reader

Kind of a weird article - it's very long, describes in great detail how everything works, and the regret is hidden about three quarters of the way down, and I am still unclear about what the regret is. That he signed up to a walled garden, and the key doesn't work when you want to share it with your dog walker? The walled garden response is "you should've known as much" and the dog walker response would be "this is version 1"

Anyway, this feels more like an ad for amazon key than a real takedown. Oh wait... WaPo, Bezos... right.

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Oh wait... WaPo, Bezos... right

It states that right near the beginning of the article.

I'm cynical in a different way, though. I see this article as the sort of turgid content that dominates tech media: Take some product or behavior that's new, act like it's scary and milk some content out of it. The title itself is simply ridiculous -- the regrets seem to be that the product is exactly what it is held as.

It isn't for me. For some people heavily invested in the Amazon ecosystem it might be a fine compromise.

Used to be you could read tech news written by people who were both knowledgable and enthusiastic about technology. Now it seems to be mostly paranoid, technophobic clickbait.

maybe that's a reflection of their audience?

In a way I absolutely think this is true, but it is more the way we consume media now than our basic values changing.

Previously I had a few sites that I visited daily to read tech news. Media properties where writers tried to keep a constant supply of entertaining and illuminating articles that I give attention and focus to, even if superficially not interesting, because I have trust that it's worth my time.

Now I instead rely upon social news and even Facebook feeds to supply the more interesting articles, filtered and crowd "curated". In that gaudy world, you need to show your legs and hoot and holler to get attention. So we end up with this sort of media. We see the same thing with blogs where many of us abandoned subscriptions and readers and just assume that the good content will percolate into our view.

I don't think I'm alone in this behavior, and it has been negative to the whole.

Isn't this because writer pay plummeted?

Skilled technical people don't write for publications because the pay is terrible compared to even an entry level tech job. The best articles I see anymore are by guest writers who do work in industry but wanted to write an article for whatever reason.

You're giving some company complete autonomous control of the keys to your house and you're calling the people skeptical technophobic? Not disagreeing that it's clickbait though.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-05-27

I dunno. I mean, there's a camera in your house and you just gave a company a key to your house to deliver products to you via some person you have never met and will likely never meet ever. Like, your paranoia meter should be red-lining.

I was able to find the regret in the seventh paragraph

>The bad news is Amazon missed four of my in-home deliveries and charged me (on top of a Prime membership) for gear that occasionally jammed and makes it awkward to share my own door with people, apps, services — and, of course, retailers — other than Amazon.

I didn't really read beyond that.

> I am still unclear about what the regret is

The regret was it was a pain in the ass, and cost a lot of money, and in the end didn't even work very well. It was a waste of time, and money, and effort, for no gain.

I don't know, the last line is pretty critical. "But the trade-off is giving more power over your life to a company that probably already has too much."

Except that you couldn't actually pull this off unless you were a large/powerful company.

Why not? Create an open standard (or use an existing one) to interface with other devices.

It's harder than a walled garden you control but very feasible.

Heck most software engineers could put together a smart lock and app to do this in a couple of months. Wouldn't be consumer ready by any means but this isn't some huge engineering challenge.

Figuring out how to market the product successfully is the harder part.

> Figuring out how to market the product successfully is the harder part.

And exactly this is what limits it to "a large/powerful company".

I think negative articles like this can hurt or help things. People know that twenty years ago, articles about how the scary internet is abducting your children got people to think more about it, then adoption kicked in. Even news about the NSA didn't get average users to change browsing habits, despite access to VPNs and tor. All the scary articles about the bitcoin bubble have undoubtedly gotten more people to buy bitcoin.

I think tech companies would prefer to be seen as dystopian over idiotic. Negative tech stories that I've heard which have destroyed the companies -- juicero, for example, or google glass -- show their customers as idiots.

Click bait headline baits click

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